The following is a guest post by Dana Camp, a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at Now IT Works

It’s a poor carpenter who blames his tools, the old saying goes. But, that saying may not always be true.

We had a client which had a widely dispersed and mobile workforce. To make things easier for them, we migrated many of their services to the cloud. Things worked well, for the most part.

When employees left the friendly confines of their homes and went to the central office, they would use the hardware there. Specifically, the printers. The print jobs would be full-color marketing pieces, many of them multiple pages long. The printing process was painfully slow.

The parade pace at which printing occurred distracted from all of the benefits that were being enjoyed by the cloud-based services and the client was considering switching to a different product. As a possible solution, we installed a new version of TSPrint, a remote desktop printing client.

We automated what we could, but we also worked with each employee to set preferences in order to remove the slower connections to the printer. We used descriptive names for the different printers to avoid confusion, which was the main sticking point of the earlier version of TSPrint.

Today, the technology works better, and the employees are no longer stuck waiting as long as they used to.

Sometimes, you just need a better toolbox to help get the job done. Or, as Lev Grossman, a technology writer for Time magazine said when he reviewed the iPhone:

When our tools don’t work, we tend to blame ourselves, for being too stupid or not reading the manual or having too-fat fingers…. When out tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole.

If you need help with your toolboxes, or your tools, please drop me a line.